In the last week, there has been increasing focus on the practice by some employers of requiring job applicants to hand over their passwords to their private accounts on social-networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace in order to gather personal data when the social-networking profiles are closed to the public. The requirements raise privacy and civil liberties questions. Illinois is among the states considering legislation to protect job applicants from these demands.

The Connecticut Democrat and former state attorney general told POLITICO that those kind of requests from prospective employers amount to an “unreasonable invasion of privacy” for those looking for work. Blumenthal said it ought to be prohibited, just like other banned employment practices such as administering polygraph tests to screen applicants.

“I am very deeply troubled by the practices that seem to be spreading voraciously around the country,” Blumenthal said in an interview. He added that an “employer has a lot of ways to find out information” about potential new employees.

Blumenthal said his bill would be ready “in the very near future.” […]

Employers have always been able to scrutinize social network accounts when prospective and current employees allow their photos, comments and other data to be public by default. Of greater concern to privacy hawks, however, are managers who are cajoling new applicants with private accounts to hand over their log-in credentials as part of the hiring process.

While state regulators begin to examine the issue, Blumenthal said Wednesday he’s drafting legislation that would outlaw it. The senator cited longstanding federal prohibitions against administering polygraph tests to potential employees as a rationale for a new law.

Employer login-mining is already illegal under several laws, and a direct violation of the terms of service. It’s no better than common phishing, but with extortion added in. Any company executive caught choosing to engage in these practices should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the existing laws. The companies they represent subject to scrutiny and appropriate legal actions, including forced to pay stipends to any individual whom they “may have discriminated against” based on any information that “may have been acquired” equal to full time wages on the period from the point of application to present, Multiplied by some constant, determined by the judge on a case by case basis, for punitive purposes of course.

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Legal errata: The opinions on Privacy Lives are those of Melissa Ngo;these are not necessarily the opinions of her clients
and should not be attributed to them.